Entries from March 31, 2013 - April 6, 2013

April 4, 2013

by Ian Pugh The oft-invoked reason
as to why we indulge in "entertainment journalism" is because it
demystifies the culture of celebrity. Proof of star public outbursts
and make-up-free faces, in other words, forces them to "our" level of
humanity. At first glance, Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant's BBC
sitcom "Extras" feeds into that fascination through parody: Proposed as
unreachable titans via eponymous episode titles, the guest stars who
tower over "background artists" Andy Millman (Gervais) and Maggie
Jacobs (Ashley Jensen) are invariably revealed to be windbags and/or
perverts. It's possible to see this as an attempt to deter us from
rumour-mongering: Kate Winslet becomes a bitter Oscar bridesmaid ("You
are guaranteed an Oscar if you play a mental," she says upon seeing a
woman with cerebral palsy), for instance, and Ben Stiller--improbably
directing a film about the Yugoslav Wars--presents himself as precisely
the kind of loser he plays in the movies but with twice the ego.

by
Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The greatest irony
of Fede Alvarez's
otherwise laudably straightforward reboot of Sam Raimi's
Spam-in-a-cabin
classic The Evil Dead is that the moments where
it references its primogenitor
are actually the movie's weakest. I'm thinking, in particular, of
handsome young hero
David (Shiloh Fernandez) getting thrown around a wet cellar in high
Raimi
smash-zoom style, which only underscores how much the original films
drew their
tone from Bruce Campbell--and how much this new one misses him. The
danger of
casting a group of beautiful people and taking itself deadly seriously
(and jettisoning the "The," in a gesture that reads as hipster
insouciance) is that Evil Dead might
draw closer to the mainstream and farther from
its grindhouse roots. The small miracle of it, then, is that in both
its
absolute glee in finding the line of how much gore to show and then
crossing it
(a pair of glasses stop a hypodermic needle...but only for a moment)
and its
surprising efforts at locating a deeper thread in a frayed
brother/sister
relationship and the impact of drug addiction, Alvarez's film is a
solid, even
affecting genre piece that allows for an abundance of memorable money
shots. Compare
its intelligence and earnestness, its infernal energy, against
the
disrespectfulness and self-satisfaction of The Cabin in the
Woods to
see that Evil Dead is not just a taste of the old
religion, it's really
pretty great.

by
Walter Chaw While safely cocooned in the lushly-padded walls of
academia, I had as my advisor a Grady Tripp--a man I respected as a
professor and as a friend. We exchanged books often, we talked a great
deal about the obscure minutiae of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's life, and
we argued over whether William and Dorothy Wordsworth were engaged in a
seedy incestual entanglement. (Yes, Brad,
they were.) I even suspect that there was a
tattered, coffee-stained manuscript tucked in the top drawer of his
desk. If you've ever had a professor who
shaped your opinions and a good portion of your intellectual life, and
if you were additionally lucky enough to call him a friend as well as a
mentor, then you're predisposed to liking Curtis Hanson's Wonder
Boys.

by Walter Chaw Julien Bishop (Ewen Bremner, of Trainspotting)
is schizophrenic, a stream-of-consciousness construct biding his time
shambling along city streets, riding public transportation, and
volunteering at a school for the blind. Aggressively disoriented and a
sower of discomfort, Julien is not only a twisted Christ figure at the
center of this most religious of Harmony Korine's pictures, but a clear
manifestation of Korine's filmmaking philosophy.

by Walter Chaw Xenia, Ohio, America's
middle-of-nowhere, is imagined by Harmony Korine (Kids)
as the quintessence of Grant Wood's slightly canted take on the gothic
at the heart of the mundane. It's a town out of step, recovering from a
tornado which, an opening narration tells us, left people dead, cats
and dogs dead, and houses ripped apart. In Gummo,
his directorial debut, one of the tasks Korine sets for himself is
detailing the psychological damage wrought on Xenia by two different
forces of nature: the lingering emotional fallout from the
almost-forgotten tornado, and the tragedy of being born with no
advantageous DNA in an ever-diminishing gene pool.

by Walter Chaw Hand-in-hand with the digital revolution of the 1990s is
this backlash against the same as technical paranoia pictures like The
Net and Hackers cohabit multiplexes with
an epidemic of John Grisham adaptations. Starting with The
Firm in 1993 and running through to The Client (1994),
The Pelican Brief (1995), A
Time to Kill and The Chamber (1996), The
Rainmaker (1997), and The Gingerbread Man
(1998), these pictures share a deep interest in not just the low-grade
hackery of Grisham's declarative-prose style, but also super-secret
societies in the halls of power. Thus was limply resurrected the
paranoid New American Cinema. It was different this time around because
the ways our realities were being manipulated by the popular culture
and mass media were no longer a product of a governmental conspiracy,
but of a perceptual mutation.* It's not about not trusting the
government (nobody has trusted the government since 1972)--it's about
not trusting the medium of film itself. Not surprisingly, directors who
carved out their reputations in the Seventies--like Francis Ford
Coppola, Robert Altman, and Alan J. Pakula--jumped on board the Grisham
train, finding familiar ground in his gallery of paper-based heroes
(lawyers, judges, newspapermen) and perhaps thinking they'd bought a
ticket back to relevance when in fact they were working in an odd
parallel phenomenon that would fail almost entirely to have any kind of
relevance or longevity. Instead of producing classics, these legends
were excavating mines they'd already exhausted three administrations
ago.

by Bryant FrazerThe Ballad of Narayama, a 1958 film by Keisuke Kinoshita, a Shochiku studio stablemate of
Ozu and Mizoguchi, opens with an unconventional gambit for a Japanese melodrama
from the 1950s. A masked M.C. knocking two blocks of wood together
matter-of-factly announces the film's title and offers a brief abstract of its
content. The fabric behind him proves to be a curtain, drawn aside after the credits are displayed--Narayama is staged as theatre, filmed by a movie
camera. The voiceover narration, accompanied by music plucked on a shamisen,
draws on traditional Japanese styles of drama. The sets are lavishly dressed
with flowers, trees, and even gently burbling brooks. And Kinoshita's repeated
strategy of changing sets in full view of the camera by pushing platforms to
the side, casting a shadow across a character, or suddenly dropping a curtain
or background to reveal a new scene behind, is borrowed from the kabuki
tradition.